In an interview with the Associated Press on Oct. 4,
Barack Obama
depicted Iran as a country living with sanctions "put in place
because Iran had not been following international guidelines, and had
behaved in ways that made a lot of people feel they were pursuing a
nuclear weapon."

For French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius,
that was a pastels-and-wispy-brushstrokes rendering of reality.
Two days later, in an interview with Europe 1 radio, Mr. Fabius drew a
darker, edgier picture. "As we speak," he said, Iran keeps the
centrifuges turning that are needed to make enriched uranium for nuclear
bombs. But Iran is also pursuing a second, separate track toward atomic
weapons with the construction, at Arak, of a heavy-water reactor
producing plutonium.

That
project might take "around a year" to complete. And "if it is
completed, you won't be able to destroy it," Mr. Fabius said, "because
if you bomb plutonium, it will leak." At that point, he said, for "the
Americans, the Israelis and others," there would no longer be adequate
sanctions to stop Tehran.

He gave no hint of who those "others"
might be. But here was the French foreign minister talking about a
possible military engagement against Iran in a more forceful manner than
anything summoned so far by the U.S. president. Mr. Fabius was not
advocating a strike, volunteering eventual French participation, or
indulging in simple Obama-bashing. But he was expressing a kind of
French contempt for the U.S. administration's evasive vocabulary about
the Iran endgame.

… Camille Grand,
the director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic
Research, argues that this France is different. Think of its first-in
role in Libya, its successful military operation against al Qaeda in
Mali, its readiness to strike Syria alongside America—at least until Mr.
Obama's reversal, which left French President
François Hollande
"flabbergasted," according to Le Monde.

Writing for the
World Today magazine, Mr. Grand describes a France that is troubled
about the dwindling prospect of Western countries "enforcing" peace and
security. "This more interventionist and Atlanticist France," he says,
"sees U.S. leadership often lacking resolve, hesitant, tempted by
strategic retrenchment."

It's a view that jibes with France's
experience with Mr. Obama's erratic policy. Last October, the White
House contacted both France and Britain to say that America would move
to an interventionist position on Syria akin to theirs after the
November U.S. election. Pfft. Both French and British officials told me
that after being kept in the dark for two months, they learned in
January this year that the White House plan was dead.

A French official also said that in a discussion on Mali in October 2012, former U.S. Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta
promised, referring to an eventual French incursion, "Whatever you need, ask me. You'll get it."

As it turned out, the White House overruled Mr. Panetta,
according to the official. The administration actually asked France for
cash in exchange for tanker aircraft to support French forces when they
entered Mali in January. Once the $50,000 per hour charge for planes to
confront al Qaeda had become a news story, it was dropped.

This
waffling entrenched French doubt about the Obama administration. In
relation to Iran and Syria, Mr. Fabius went on the record in July asking
if the "international community" couldn't stop
Bashar Assad
—and the "international community" obviously hasn't—then "where's
the credibility of our assurances Iran will not get nuclear arms?"

Last
week, I asked an Élysée Palace official about the solidity of two parts
of the notional French position: One, that the Iranian mullahs must
officially "renounce" their nuclear-weapons ambitions, and two, that
they must make an unmistakable "strategic leap" that would demonstrate
they are not trying to retain options that could possibly lead to making
a bomb.

The official said: "To have credibility on security
issues like Iran you must be firm and consistent, and not zigzag,"
choosing a kind of semi-polite international code word to describe Mr.
Obama's course on Syria.

But French diplomacy is not the U.S.
Congress, which has been demonstrably tougher than the White House or
France on sanctions (and possibly other alternatives) to punish Tehran's
endless defiance. …